, 1887-11-06
HEALING BY MENTAL IMPRESSION.
Curing Wounds by Hypnotic Suggestion.
A ScIentIst,s I-nvestIgations.

~uTlnB "ounub Dy hyphOLiC SuEstbtions
A Scientists Investigations.
Professor Delboeuf, of Liege, is GER
tainly the most versatile of living investi-
gators, when one considers the great
originality and suggestiveness of all the
work he does. Ancient and modern Ian
guages, logic, general physics and physi-
ology, and especially experimental psy-
chology, have received his attention by
turns. His latest contribution is to Their
apeutics, and is a communication made
on june 4 to the Belgian academy, which
will probably turn out to be of the great
est theoretical as well as practical i'm
p%ortanCe.
We all are familiar with accounts of
the wounds inflicted OF themselves by
African dervishes; but the statement
which the narrators always make, that
the wounds do not inflame, or may even
be quite healed in twenty-four hours,
probably often tend to discredit their
whole description in the readers mind.
Delboeuf's Observations now make these
stories wholly plausible. 1t is well es-
tablished that in certain hypnotic sub
jects a suggestion made during trance,
that to a part of their body a cautery or
a blister is applied. will produce, after
due lapse of time, an actual vesication of
the skin. The hallucinatory feeling of
inflammation produces in these persons a
genuine inflammation. NJ. Delboeuf ar
Gued from this, that the feeling of pain,
however useful in other respects, must
itself be an inflammatory i~rritant, and
went on to infer that the abolition IF it
from an actual wound ought to a~cceler-
ate its healing. He Immediately thought
of some hypnotic subjects whom he had
,,Na1n a,,p,atlat,a ,-1 "a. ,,l.-. l. III
b often admired the rapidity with which
the marks of punctures and pinchings
disappeared, n proceeded to more sys-
tematic experiments, which, SO far as
they go, seem to verify his hypothesis
perfectly.
On a young woman whom he could
make insensible by suggestion, he marked
two corresponding spots, one on each
arm, II made on each an identical burn
with the hot iron, announcing to the pa
tient that the one Oh the right should not
be felt. The suggestion took effect; and
the next day, when the ~bandages were
taken off, and the left arm presented a
vesicled sore with an inflammatory area
three centimetres in diameter, the right
arm showed only a clean scorch of the
skin of the exact size of the iron (eight
millimetres diameter), without redness
or Inflammation. On another subject
similar results were obtained with burns
and blisters, the spots chosen being near
together on the same arm or on the neck.
The experiments are few in number, and
ought to be multiplied; but the reader
will Immediately see the vista which they
open.
Many of the results of the "mind cure"
and the strange fact, so long known, of
opium controlling intlammations, are ex-
planned by NJ. Delboeuf's principle. So is
the popular belief in hardening" ones
self by a little j%udicious indifference, and
neglect of ones condition. Local pain is
useful in leading us to protect the
wounded part from mechanical abrasion
several of NJ. Delboeuf's experiments
were ~inconclusive, because the subjects,
being insensible at the seat of their in
juries, allowed them to get scraped, etc.
but it has the drawback of exciting re-
flex changes of nutrition of an unfavor-
able kind. Anesthetizing a wound pre-
vents these reflex changes. NJ. Delboeuf,
suggesting to n very sensitive subject that
she should not feel a severe dental opera
ton, was assured by the dentist that
what he found most extraordinary in the
whole performance was the absence of
the salivary secretion which would
usually have accompanied it.-Science.